Harry Hole Oslo Sequence 10 - Police

intense until finally he just dropped his hand and looked at her with a desperate expression of capitulation. ‘Goddamn, Katrine, this is pathetic.’
    Katrine looked at him. Started laughing. The prat looked so sweet when he was like that.
    ‘Did you drive here?’ she asked.
    Truls Berntsen woke up.
    Staring ahead of him, around him, everything was white and well lit. And he no longer felt any pain. On the contrary, it felt wonderful. White and wonderful. He had to be dead. Of course he was dead. Strange. Or even stranger that he had been sent to the wrong place. To the good place.
    He felt his body turn. Perhaps he was a bit premature about the good place, he was still on the way there. And now he could hear sounds as well. The distant lament of a foghorn rising and falling. The ferryman’s foghorn.
    Something appeared in front of him, something that shielded him from the light.
    A face.
    Another face appeared. ‘He can have more morphine if he starts screaming.’
    And then Truls felt it return. The pain. His whole body ached, his head felt like it was about to explode.
    They turned again. Ambulance. He was in an ambulance with its sirens wailing.
    ‘I’m Ulsrud from Kripos,’ the face above him said. ‘Your ID card says you’re Officer Truls Berntsen.’
    ‘What happened?’ Truls whispered.
    ‘A bomb went off. It smashed all the windowpanes in the neighbourhood. We found you in the fridge inside the flat. What happened?’
    Truls closed his eyes and heard the question repeated. Heard the other man, presumably a medic, telling the policeman not to push the patient. Who after all was on morphine, so could make up anything he liked.
    ‘Where’s Hole?’ Truls whispered.
    He noticed the bright light was blocked again. ‘What did you say, Berntsen?’
    Truls tried to moisten his lips, feeling he had no lips to moisten.
    ‘The other guy. Was he in the fridge too?’
    ‘There was only you in the fridge, Berntsen.’
    ‘But he was there. He . . . he saved my life.’
    ‘If there was anyone else in the flat I’m afraid whoever it was is now new wallpaper and paint. Everything inside was blown to smithereens. Even the fridge you were in was pretty smashed up, so you’re lucky to be alive. If you can tell me who was behind the bomb we could start looking for him.’
    Truls shook his head. Imagined he was shaking his head at least. He hadn’t seen him, he had been behind him when he led him from his own car to another where he had sat at the back with the gun trained on Truls’s head while Truls drove. Drove them to Hausmanns gate 92. An address so tainted with narcotic criminality he had almost forgotten it was a crime scene. Gusto. Of course. And it was then that he knew what until then he had managed to repress. That he was going to die. That it was the cop killer behind him as they went up the steps, in through the metal door, who taped him to the chair, staring at him from behind the green mask. Truls had watched him walk around the portable TV and insert a screwdriver, noticed that the counter, which had started working on the screen when the door closed behind them, had stopped and was then turned back to six minutes. A bomb. Then the man in green had taken out a baton, identical to the one he himself had used, and had started hitting Truls in the face. With concentration, without any visible enjoyment or emotional involvement. Light blows, not enough to break bones, but enough to burst veins and arteries, swelling the face with the blood pouring out and lying beneath the skin. Then he had started to hit him harder. Truls had lost all feeling in his skin, he could only feel that it burst, could feel the blood running down his neck and chest, the dull pain in his head, in his brain – no, even deeper than his brain – whenever the baton landed. And he saw the man in green, a dedicated church bell-ringer convinced of the importance of his work, swinging the hammer at the inside of the bronze bell, as little jets of blood spattered Rorschach blots on the green smock. Heard the crunch of nasal bone and cartilage being crushed, felt his teeth crack and fill his mouth, felt his jaw loosen and hang from its own nerve fibres . . . and then – finally – everything went black.
    Until he woke again, to the pains of hell, and he saw him without the surgeon outfit. Harry Hole standing in front of a fridge.
    At first he was confused.
    Then it seemed logical. Hole would want to dispatch someone who knew